Wii's Next Zelda Game

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Miyamoto says the franchise needs some big new ideas. What might the successor to Twilight Princess play and look like?

By Matt Casamassina

When Nintendo unveiled The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2004 to a packed auditorium of journalists and fans, the crowd went wild, and some people in attendance actually cried. Yes -- real, genuine tears, induced by the very sight of a reborn Link, no longer a cel-shaded boy but a teenage warrior surrounded by a realistic world. Decades after the classic game released, few franchises in the history of the industry share the same powerful hold over players as Zelda, and yet Shigeru Miyamoto's series about a Hyrulian hero and a kidnapped princess has stayed stubbornly true to its roots through the years, a fact that some critics held against Twilight Princess when it shipped two years ago. These criticisms haven't fallen on deaf ears, for Miyamoto himself commented in an IGN interview that Zelda is "... a franchise that does need some big new unique ideas."

Miyamoto offered those words at E3 2008, where he also confirmed that a new Wii Legend of Zelda game is in development by key members of the Twilight Princess and Phantom Hourglass teams. This new title is poised to be fundamentally different from its predecessors for a couple key reasons. First, Nintendo is obviously aware that the series needs a new hook or two -- even if Twilight Princess remains, in our humble opinion, one of the best adventure games of the generation, it lacks a certain freshness, largely because it adheres to the age-old Zelda formula. And second, whereas Twilight Princess began its life as a GameCube title and was later ported to Wii, this new Zelda project will be designed from the ground up to take advantage of Nintendo's little white box. It's with all of this in mind that we explore the the potential dos and the don'ts and focus our eyes keenly on the future of the Zelda franchise. Here are just a few possibilities:

A Compelling New Tale Nintendo prides itself on creating games that simply play exceptionally well, but seldom do its titles, even those grand adventures, feature rich and compelling stories, particularly by today's standards. Although Link's journey to save princess Zelda has seen several unique variations over the years, it is usually still the same quest with new bells and whistles and it is partially because of this that titles like Twilight Princess and Ocarina of Time feel so similar, whereas an all-new tale might have created a greater divide between the games. Case in point, you won't see any comparisons to director Eiji Aonuma's first N64 Zelda, Majora's Mask, for that dark and difficult title included an original storyline set outside of the traditional save-the-princess theme.

"I would love to see a Zelda title that really takes story to the next level. Twilight Princess did a great job with storytelling -- more so than any other Zelda, I believe. I'd just like to see that taken a few steps further," says Kevin Cassidy, who operates the Nintendo website Go Nintendo. "We know that there are people on the Zelda team that would love to create a deep, rich story, but Miyamoto doesn't seem too fond of it. I think it's time to take the franchise in a more narrative direction. I think gamers can handle a Zelda with complex emotions, rather than on-the-surface responses."

We loved the wolf mechanic in Twilight Princess. We also loved Midna. What can Nintendo come up with next?

The narrative in Twilight Princess called upon the same methods that worked for Ocarina of Time a decade before it -- namely, a combination of game-engine cut-scenes, text bubbles and character grunts to drive story. No pre-rendered cinematics and no voice work, the latter of which has remained a pet-peeve of ours. Cassidy, though, stands atop the other side of the chasm.